eXtensions - Monday 29 July 2024
By Graham K. Rogers
This week Apple will release its Q3 2024 results: right on time, the rumors begin. There has been some discussion this week on beta releases from Apple about to be released. A problem with Mail was caused by an issue with iCloud Private Relay: now fixed. iPhone 15 Pro overheating (not here): are different batteries involved? Apple releases a Maps beta for the browser and a local road problem has finally been fixed after over a year.
Apple's conference call to discuss its Q3 2024 results is scheduled for Thursday, 1 August 1 2024. The time, according to the Apple Investor page is, as usual, 14:00 Cupertino time or 17:00 in New York. The time that this starts should be around 02:00 here so I will pick up the news over breakfast.
Right on cue the rumors begin, with a dubious Dennis Sellers (AppleWorld Today) reporting on a DigiTimes story about the foldable phone that Apple has been rumored to have in development for years. I am glad to see that Sellers has doubts, like me. I do not believe that Apple will produce a foldable phone: too risky. We are, however, reminded by MacDaily News that Apple does have a patent for just such a device. Actually, Apple appears to have several. I was unable to find the specific illustration or patent that was in the article, but Patently Apple has a page of links to Apple patents for foldable devices. Just because there is a patent, does not mean a product is imminent.
I recently supervised a graduate student who came to me with her writing. It was not too bad (as non-native speakers of English go - they all have problems and it is my job to help), but I was interested in the way she listened carefully to my comments and then wrote down the ideas right away onto a foldable Samsung. The clear, white screen was about twice the size of a normal phone (of course). I estimated it was just a bit smaller than the iPad mini screen (and squared off). We chatted a bit about this and she said it was good for her work (that much was clear), but she expected the fold would break.
And this is why I think that Apple will not go for such a format unless there is a way, with materials, design or engineering that will reduce (to nothing) that risk, even with those patents (above). Bending a material weakens it. In his book, To Engineer is Human (1992), Henry Petroski discusses material strength and outlines the paper-clip test (Chap 3). I have used this in class. Students are asked to bend paperclips back and forth. Eventually, they break, but just before there is increased heat: [F]ailure by fatigue is not a precisely predictable event (Petroski).
Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple will discontinue the Plus model of its smartphone when the iPhone 17 line-up debuts in 2025 (Dennis Sellers, AppleWorld Today). In addition, Patently Apple reports on another claim from Ming-Chi Kuo, that Apple will use the long-rumored in-house designed modems in 2025 and dump the Qualcomm ones. Dennis Sellers (AppleWorld Today) casts some doubt on this and does not expect this move to Apple's own modems until 2027.
The release of beta versions of Apple's various operating systems continues. As well as the developer releases and user versions of the upcoming new OS iterations (iOS 18; macOS 15, Sonoma; et al), current versions are also tested as betas before they are made available. It was reported this week that there should be updates soon to the current OS versions, with the release candidate versions (e.g. macOS 14.6; iOS 17.6) being seeded (Juli Clover, MacRumors).
However, in another MacRumors report, Hartley Charlton (MacRumors) outlines a Gurman rumor about the release of the iOS 18.1 beta next week while the iOS 18 beta is still in testing. Charlton comments that this approach is "highly unusual". This delay is apparently because (the rumor tells us) the Apple Intelligence features are to be delayed until iOS 18.1 to give Apple time to fix bugs. There is a high possibility that this could be so. Far better a delay than a buggy release: a common Apple approach that others might take on board. Taimur Asad (Redmond Pie) also reports on this and notes the potential for confusion.
It was revealed at Comic-Con 2024 this week that Season 2 of Silo will be on our screens 15 November. New episodes will streaming each week and the 10-episode series will end in January (Lloyd Coombes, iMore). The end of the first season revealed that there were several other silos in close proximity to the one featured in the series. I am dying to find out about these, but do not expect any answers to be in episode 1 of Series 2: where would the suspense be?
On Netflix currently I am enjoying Series 2 of Kleo, a less-than-serious German language depiction of spies in East Germany (and beyond) at the time just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Kleo herself was a super-assassin, but in the disingenuous world of espionage is jailed for her crimes. On her release she is seeking answers. And revenge. Series 1 and 2 are not to be taken seriously and there is much humor here (with some truths) as the almost-indestructible Kleo does what she does. Netflix has a number of good series from north Europe and Scandinavia especially. I have to watch them with subtitles but this does not detract from the drama and enjoyment. Apple is developing a German language series, a dark comedy, entitled "Where's Wanda?" (MacDaily News), which indicates the service has begun to look outside its North American base, which is good if they want to attract a worldwide audience.
I had problems with Apple's Mail app this week on all my devices. It has not been loading images. Although this has sometimes happened before with the odd message or two, this was almost every email. A couple did have logos or other content, but most were imageless. I noticed on Friday that at the top of the affected messages were two warnings: the first was a note that images were not loading due to network settings, which sent me off on a wild goose chase of settings and online sources; the second was to tell me that the message was from a mailing list and provided a link to unsubscribe.
With that first warning, which was the one relevant to the problem, I was able to load the images once I had noticed this option, but doing this for every message was a little tedious. However, as I was going through the news, I found an item by Michael Simon on MacWorld, which explained exactly what was happening. There had been problems with iCloud Relay this week ("Since Thursday") and this was one of the results. It was "preventing images from loading as a security measure."
Two options were offered in the article: press the Load Content option at the top of the message (which was what I was already doing); or turn off iCloud Private Relay in Settings, which I would prefer to avoid in a normal situation and that did not work for some users anyway. As it turns out, immediately after reading that article, I checked email again on the iPad and the images were loading.
However, I did have a look at System Status and that showed that there were still "Issues" with iCloud Private Relay. For some reason, messages on the iPhone were still failing to load, while the same messages on Mac or iPad Pro did load them. Images appeared in Mail on the iPhone about an hour later, but the status page still showed that there was an issue. It now shows, "Resolved Issue".
I did a double-take when I read the iMore headline (Oliver Haslam): "Apple's iPhone 16 will reportedly fix the overheating issue that plagued its predecessor, here's how". My immediate reaction was, "What overheating?" I do notice that the M4 iPad Pro is slightly warm when I remove it from the charger, but I have had my iPhone Pro since September 2023 and we recently went through a summer period when temperatures reached just over 40° C here. Not once has the phone felt hot despite the leather folio I use; and I keep it in a back pocket much of the time so would be sure to notice.
The report includes a number of comments about users being "plagued" by the problem, including, "Owners of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max in particular have spent almost a year dealing with handsets that get altogether too hot at times" and that this will "be good news for those who have dealt with the overheating problem for the last year". Problem; what problem? I note that in the comments section a reader from Italy likewise wrote that there had been no experience of overheating on the iPhone Pro and Europe has been somewhat warm this year too. However, I ran a search online (overheating+iPhone 15 Pro) and found several sources that did show some users had indeed felt their phones were running hot and a couple of sources that claimed Apple noted this was "expected behavior". How hot is hot?
I wonder if this is a question of the specific battery that is installed in the phone. A friend who owns an iPhone 15 Pro identical to mine shows that since January this year, the battery capacity has fallen to 88%. He complains often that he has to charge the phone. Mine arrived in September 2023 and still shows the battery capacity as 96% with a cycle count as 220. My friend's cycle count is much higher (it would be if it has to be charged more often). The battery lasts all day for me (not for my friend) and I work on it throughout the day, including high use of the Personal Hotspot. The serial numbers show that the phones were assembled in different countries.
The total direct financial loss faced by Fortune 500 companies as a result of the 19 July Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage has been set at approximately $5.4bn (£4.18bn), at an average weighted loss of $44m per organisation, rising to close to $150m for the most heavily affected, such as airlines (Alex Scroxton, Computer Weekly). In the meantime, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bichierai (TechCrunch) reports that CrowdStrike offered a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for the outage, although some of those cards did not work when the recipients tried to redeem them. $10 seems a bit if an insult when $5.4b was allegedly lost; and then finding out that they don't work is even more insulting. The company will have to go a long way to build all the bridges it has now burnt. Any bets on a Chapter 5 bankruptcy?
I do not have Google Maps on the iPhone or the iPad, so if I need to confirm something map-wise, after using the Apple Maps app on one of my devices, I will use a browser to access Google. There are no doubt many users of devices who do not have the Apple Maps app installed, so it was interesting to see that Apple has now made a beta version of its Maps available via the web. Juli Clover (MacRumors) reports that it "works in Safari and other web browsers" and that it appears to work in the same way as the Maps app does, although there are only 3 view options: Standard, Hybrid and Satellite. The latter pair appear almost identical, although Hybrid includes road numbers and place names.
I had a look at the local map display in Safari and saw that a new road that I use near Nakhon Pathom was now shown. I reported in July 2023 that on the Mac and mobile devices the app showed the road in satellite view only: road maps did not have this. After checking the browser (beta) version, I looked at the app on the iPhone and found that, over a year after it was built, the new (and important road - it goes to provincial court buildings) has now been added.
Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs. After 3 years writing a column in the Life supplement, he is now no longer associated with the Bangkok Post. He can be followed on X (@extensions_th). The RSS feed for the articles is http://www.extensions.in.th/ext_link.xml - copy and paste into your feed reader.
For further information, e-mail to
Back to
eXtensions
Back to
Home Page